Jamie Huskisson Nottingham UK PHP, Magento, Wordpress freelance developer

1. Does the media have no morals left?

   The superficial is reporting that footage of Anna Nicole Smith’s last moments (medics trying to revive her etc.) has been sold to an un-named media company in a bidding war ending at $500,000.
   (WARNING: LINK DOES CONTAIN THE VIDEO)

   How far is too far with the media? They seem to be willing to go to sick lengths for stories. I haven’t been so sickened since I heard about an Italian newspaper printing a picture of Princess Diana lying dead after the car crash that killed her on their front page.

   And was it just as wrong for Superficial to put the video up?

   1 Comment »

2. Re-enabling error reporting in MAMP

   For some reason error reporting is turned off by default in MAMP.. So this is how to re-enable it to how it should be.

   1. Find your ‘MAMP’ directory in ‘Applications’

   2. Find ‘conf’ and open it up..

   3. Open up php4 or php5 (depending on your enabled version)

   4. Line 270 should be something like this:
   error_reporting = E_ALL

   5. Line 277 will be:
   display_errors = Off

   Change this to:
   display_errors = On

   6. Restart servers

   And voila! We have PHP errors..

   44 Comments »

3. NTL becomes Virgin Media, but will they provide the light so badly needed?

   NTL today re-branded itself as ‘Virgin Media’ in a bold move by Virgin. Why is it a bold move? Because the Virgin brand (with the exception of their phones) are a trusted brand – NTL is completely the opposite.

   Changes include a new ‘download movies/tv shows’ service for broadband users (something I’ll certainly be looking into), ‘no limits’ broadband (something previously promised by NTL), a much much simpler website and from the looks of it – real HDTV support. I’ve also noticed their policy fully supports companies making lawsuits against their customers such as ‘illegal’ downloading and that Virgin will support them in any way they can (something that NTL stopped a while ago, since the time of ‘the letter’ coming in the mail).

   Beforehand the website had become so cluttered for use that made no sense that it not only was it annoying to use but you had to click 3-4 times to get to a page that you wanted – and that’s if you where clicking in the right places.

   Here’s five things ‘Virgin Media’ needs to do to revive NTL out the dark ages:
   - Make the broadband stable. It needs to stay up 24/7 and not have constant ‘down time’ for ‘maintenance’ at eight hours a time. Support your users and give us real ‘uncapped’ downloading – no hidden messages when the user downloads too much one month.

   - Revive the promises of NTL from their Digital department. We hear about ‘new 200gb boxes that let you record and all this jazz’ every time someone comes out to replace one of our NTL digital boxes (which is once a year, at least). I want to see some of this in action.. I want to see these boxes and have the company show me that something is happening rather than just talking about it. Up until now those ‘jazz boxes’ have been in testing for two years.

   - Hire some decent programmers for the digital service – or just use Telewest. Telewest merged with NTL a while back and we’ve not seen a single benefit from it. However, Telewest offers instant channel browsing, a real guide system, smaller boxes, better remotes, instant on-demand, teletext… shall I keep going? The point is, Telewest have done something great with their software on their boxes, NTL haven’t – why isn’t this something all customers are experiencing?

   - Stop closing NTL customer support buildings. My mum used to work at one and this building has shut down 10 or so departments out of 12 or so since she left. Not a direct reflection of her leaving but merely a showing of how little NTL has valued customer support that comes from this country. We are now shipped to India where people don’t know what ‘E4′ and ‘The family movie package’ actually is – which makes our calls three times longer and ten times more frustrating.

   - Bring the Virgin brand in with force. Give us a sleek red box with the Virgin brand that becomes the purple cow of boxes underneath the television, give us something to say ‘Virgin have come into the digital market’ and don’t stand still with the innovation and improvements for four years like NTL have done with their ‘Jazz boxes’

   - Number six (isn’t there always one extra?) – improve the damn interactive service. Why can’t NTL users press Red when it says so? Sky customers can.. I can only presume this is because it’s a bad platform behind it. We can on E4.. and recently BBC, but not really anywhere else.

   3 Comments »

4. Inspiration, a fortune cookie special

   Everyone needs inspiring from time to time, and one of those great times is being surprised by a fortune cookie when having a meal. The following are cropped versions of Flickr photo’s and I have provided credit underneath each one with a link back to the original source to meet their respective creative commons licensing.

   
   Taken by ~C4Chaos, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by lauralei, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by threed, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by adobemac, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by rubyran, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by chrisilstrup, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by Steve Roe, original Flickr photo here.

   
   Taken by hollyQQ , original Flickr photo here.

   Can you find anymore inspirational fortune cookies? Post them in the comments for all to read :)

   1 Comment »

5. Five reasons bad clients are good for us

   This article is also posted on DevLounge.net and can also be read there.

   I find people complain a lot about bad clients and how much they hate them (naturally). But instead of writing yet another one of those tired old posts that are so popular slating them and their inability to understand things that are ‘basic’ to us, I decided to flip the table and write about how good they are for us.

   1. They make you work harder

   Having problems with a client makes the day harder and it makes you work harder. If we all did easy work all the time there it wouldn’t make an interesting job, and it would be fairly boring after a while.

   2. You learn from it personally

   You make mistakes, you learn from them. You pick bad clients – you learn to spot bad clients. Things the clients say, things they do, how they approach you – all these things we can learn from and better ourselves in our chosen areas.

   3. They keep your work interesting for others

   People love gossip (especially in England) – so what better to gossip about than your work? What better to relate with your friends or partner with than a bad experience with a client?

   Something that happened today, something they said, how they said it, how stupid that demand was – all of these things don’t involve technical aspects of the work that would confuse someone who isn’t in the area.

   Gossip is how people in technical areas such as computing relate to others about their job whatever area they are in and don’t we all love it.

   4. You are challenged in places you don’t want to be

   Can you float that advertisement over the content and then make it invisible please? Can you make that list go alphabetically, then order by numbers, make it criss-crossed and make this picture over here flash colours when you click this link?

   Bad clients can think of terrible things you could never dream of, but isn’t learning how to do them what makes our work interesting?

   5. They test your character

   Are you willing to float the banner over the content and make it invisible? Make that picture flash colours when the link is clicked? Or is it not ethical? Are you going to shout at a client because they make you do things you don’t want to do? How do you handle it?

   All of these things test our characters as professionals and everyday people. How we deal with them tells us a lot about ourselves and it lets us learn from the experiences.

   So can we all agree that at least sometimes bad clients are good for us? That they make our lifes a little more interesting?

   If you know of anymore reasons bad clients may be good for us all, please add your comment below and I will post them in any future follow up articles :)

   12 Comments »

6. Three MyUniverse themed RSS ads added

   I’ll add new RSS ad’s whenever something I work on is cool enough to be added. Here’s three based on the MyUniverse comic launched earlier today.

   3 Comments »

7. MyUniverse Web Comic launched

   
   (Click here for the My Universe post 00 ‘My-Tuts launch’)

   MyUniverse, a web comic from the genius that is Richard Shilling launched today. Whilst it’s still heavily under construction in terms of design, we’ve decided to put it online with all existing comics uploaded. There are 24 in total so far.

   Richard will soon be offering extras such as wallpapers, MSN display pictures and the like – and will also be offering a character creation service on the site with characters looking simular to the characters I display in my header image of myself.

   The comic is based around student life at university and the funny moments that occur, and it will be released on a weekly basis for the time being. Though this may become more regular when holidays occur.

   Click here to visit the MyUniverse web comic

   5 Comments »

8. Truly inspiring Adidas advertisement: Never lost heart

   
   (Click here to view the full sized image)

   The advert reads “14 stitches, neck operation, fractured shoulder, haematoma to right arm, appendicitis, lacerated kidney, torn abducter muscle, knee ligament damage… never lost heart. Impossible is nothing”.

   It is based on the English rugby fly-half Jonny Wilkinson who kicked the winning field goal for our world cup win in 2003. And his determination to come back against a mass list of injuries.

   Jonny Wilkinson recently played again for the first time for England after 1,169 days of time out from injuries in the 2007 Six Nations Championship game against Scotland on February 3, 2007. He scored 27 points in that game (a record in the Calcutta Cup) and was awarded Man of the Match.

   Truly inspiring.

   1 Comment »

9. Digital receipts

   Why haven’t receipts gone digital yet? Why is paper still used for this?

   I don’t know about you but when I receive a receipt at my local Co-Op or Tesco I simply put it into the bag and it gets thrown away along with the bag once my shopping is put away. And I can’t even begin to imagine how much paper and ink is wasted along with all this. Sure it’s recyclable, but who cares? Your still chopping down thousands (probably tens of thousands) of trees for all these wasted receipts.

   My proposal – integrate it into bank cards. Let me click on a transaction in my online banking account and view the details for that purchase. How? Integrate it via the PIN input system, get a data standard for it all. In the end all the system would be doing is sending a few kilobytes instead of a few bytes through the fibre optic cable.

   Better yet, localize the system – make it a gimmick with your store card. Let me view my Tesco receipts on my Tesco store card login online. Tesco already keep the data for market research purposes.. why not let me view it after purchasing at the store? Put in a simple ‘do you want receipts?’ option in my login so I can turn down receipts automatically upon the swiping of my club card. “Take your receipts with you!” – help me build an automatic shopping basket online of my regular goods. The possibilities of laziness are endless.

   One step further – the mobile phone. Store it on my SIM card via some kind of infrared scanning. One for the future, but something to think about (especially with the emergence of payment with mobile phones in Japan, which hopefully is coming to the western world sooner rather than later).

   7 Comments »

10. Seth Godin: Purple Cow

    Purple Cow is a great book of 1-3 page tidbits accumulating in a book about how to make your idea/business so unique that people have to look at it.

    The idea is that if you create a purple cow of a product/business amongst a field of ordinary cows then anyone looking at a cow in that field will see the purple cow above the rest (more often than not).

    I found the book a brilliant read and managed to read it in the two days of my train journey to and from London this past weekend. Purple Cow weighs in at a small 145 pages which is small when compared to other books in the business/marketing category. The size of the book immediately raised it to the front of my queue for books to read.

    As an inspiring businessman for the future I found Purple Cow to be an essential read and would recommend it to anyone else thinking of starting up a business in the future. That said – this book is just as relevant to the current businessmen of today and everyone should learn to be the Purple Cow in their respective fields.

    Seth Godin also has an online blog if you would like to subscribe. You can find it at: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. His official site is located at: http://www.sethgodin.com

    7 Comments »

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